It’s Ask Angry time again. That’s when I answer questions submitted by masochists who think an answer’s worth a thousand words of personal insults. Are you such a masochist? Send your question to ask.angry@angry.games. Tell me explicitly and unambiguously what to call you such that it would hold up in court. And keep your answer on the short side of brief. If I can’t decide at a glance if it’s worth my time, it isn’t.

I’m only doing two questions this week. Sorry, Mad Bishop. I know I promised you an answer. You’ll get it. It’s coming later when I talk more about starting simple, homebrew campaigns. I just couldn’t get to it today.

Today’s questions both reference recent s$&% I’ve written. They’re requests for clarification, expansion, and explanation. Basically, the sort of question’s you’d all ask at the end of class. Especially a particularly long, rambling class taught by an obfuscating narcissist.

Let me set up the first question before I share it.

A few weeks ago, I finally f$&%ing finished my three-part-and-a-bit series on doing treasure right in D&D. While telling y’all why it’s important to actually describe your treasures, I said this:

I know it’s tempting to blow off the narrative, descriptive bulls$&% part as unimportant, fluffy… well… bulls$&%. I get it. But don’t. I only call it narrative, descriptive bulls$&% because I’ve got a writing style to maintain. The Angry Games brand team rides my a$& like you wouldn’t believe. Truth is, the descriptive part isn’t bulls$&%. And it’s not even narrative. It’s actually part of something I call Double Secret Game Mechanics. Game mechanics so secret even the game’s designers don’t know they exist. But you probably don’t want to hear about that.

A few days later, I found this in my Ask Angry mailbox:

Hi Angry,

What are Double Secret Game Mechanics, you teasing scoundrel? xD

Naturally, I immediately did some breathing exercises my therapist showed me because replacing computer monitors is getting expensive. What was it that threatened to send my fist involuntarily flying? Well, partly it was that obnoxious xD bulls$&% at the end. But mostly it was because the sender didn’t tell me what to call him. Or her. Or it. Or them.

How the f$&% hard is this, really? How hard?! Just open with, “hi Angry, call me Dingleberry, here’s my question…” You’d think I hadn’t repeated literally that instruction ten thousand f$&%ing times.

Amusingly, I took to Angry’s Amazing Discord Server — which you can access by supporting this site — to bitch about the e-mail in question. Without identifying the sender, of course. And soon thereafter, I received another e-mail with a sheepish non-apology and an actual name. Turns out, the sender somehow managed to figure out to support this site and join the Discord server despite their lack of basic reading comprehension skills.

And no, being a paying customer doesn’t get you any slack. Sorry.

I deleted the second e-mail because, like Alex Trebek, Angry has to accept your first answer. So…

Dingleberry asks…

Hi Angry,

What are Double Secret Game Mechanics, you sexy gaming genius?

Truth is, I feel kind of bad about this s$&%. Firstly, because the double secret game mechanics thing was a reference to a classic movie that came out before most of you zygotes even existed.

Secondly, I feel bad because I was obviously playing Dance for Your Article. That’s where I hint that there’s some really interesting and important concept I’m not telling you about so that you’ll have to beg for it and make me feel big and powerful and help me forget I’m basically just a friendless hermit who sits around in his underwear writing instruction manuals about how to pretend to be an elf and calls that a career and…

Sorry. Lost my train of thought there.

Anyway, I feel bad about the Dance for Your Article thing here because, honestly, there’s not really an article in that topic. Not a whole one. Even if I dragged it out, I could get, at best, a couple thousand words out of it. It just ain’t good feature fodder.

But it does work as a single topic in a feature wherein I bulls$%& about a bunch of disjointed single topics. So, it’s a good thing Dingleberry e-mailed me about it. Or else you’d never know what I meant by Double Secret Game Mechanics.

But since Double Secret Game Mechanics are basically a bunch of high-minded bulls$&% and don’t represent anything you don’t already know from reading my s$&%, this is probably going to be a letdown.

When I used that phrase — DSGM — I was being snide. Snarky. It was really just a different way of saying that GMs have to use their f$&%ing brains before — and often instead of — turning to game mechanics. That said, there is a little more to it. And it is important for you to really take this s$&% to heart. If you can make yourself really believe what I’m about to explain, it’ll make you a better GM.

Let me tell you a story. One I’ve shared before, I think. But one that perfectly illustrates what I’m saying. And one I like telling. So I’m telling it again.

Years ago, I was a player at a sanctioned, official D&D 4E event at a local game store. Player. Not GM. And the GM was not impressing me. Not at all.

At one point, one of the other players — a fairly new-ish player — took a blast of fire breath to the face. To his character’s face. In the game. This wasn’t a Mad Max Thunderdome Cage Match. Just a tabletop RPG session.

Anyway, the character took a blast of fire to the face. As a result, the character was inflicted with Ongoing 5 Fire Damage. If you ain’t familiar with it, that’s 4E-speak. It means that the character takes five points of damage — fire-type damage — at the start of each turn. And at the end of each turn, the player rolls a saving throw to end the condition. With me so far?

Obviously and understandably, the player was a bit troubled by this turn of events. So, on his turn, he asked the GM what his character could do to “put himself out.” The GM said there really wasn’t anything he could do. The GM wasn’t technically wrong. I mean, he was wrong. And I’ll get to that below. But in the sense of blind and a$&holish adherence to the letter of the rulebook, he wasn’t wrong.

It was all down to some errata that had been published and how the game’s first-aid-ish skill — Medicine — had been changed and whether a character counted as an ally of himself and all sorts of other s$&%. Long story short, by a strict reading of the rules, there was not — at the time — any die roll a player could make to end the Ongoing 5 Fire Damage condition on himself.

This was one of 4E’s things, by the way. And every edition’s got a few things. Things that, strictly by the rules, just don’t work. Things the designers keep trying to tweak and change and fix. Which just makes s$&% worse. 5E’s things include the whole unarmed weapon nonsense, stealth, and the entire f$&%ing ranger class.

But back to the story…

The player was growing increasingly desperate. “Can I roll around on the ground to extinguish myself,” he asked. “Can I smother the flames with my cloak to put myself out?” And the GM wasn’t having any of it. The GM kept pointing out there was nothing he could do to end the Ongoing 5 Fire Damage condition on himself, though one of his allies could do so.

And that, right there, is the crux of it. The player kept saying things like “put myself out” and “extinguish myself” and “douse the flames.” And the GM bullheadedly only kept repeating the game mechanical term Ongoing 5 Fire Damage.

Of course, even back in the halcyon days of 2009, I was a sexy gaming genius. And I saw what was really going on. The problem was, in the player’s head, the character was on fire. Or, at least, his hair and clothes were on fire. And there’s ways to deal with that s$&%. You learn “stop, drop, and roll” in elementary school. Die rolls be damned, if you’re on fire, you can put yourself out.

Meanwhile, in the GM’s head, tumbleweeds were blowing through a featureless expanse of desert where a brain should have been.

Sorry. That was unkind. I’m still pissed off about this issue. I have no patience for bad GMs who get to run sanctioned events and destroy new players’ first experiences with the games I love. And also their first experiences with games I tolerate. Like D&D 5E.

In the GM’s head, glowing green bits of computer code were swirling around. Every time the OnUpdate function was called, While (OngoingDamage == 5), the integer HitPoints was being decremented. In other words, the GM was handling the game mechanics as expertly as any computer could. But the player was immersed in a fantastic world of imagination and adventure. The two of them couldn’t speak to each other because one was talking in the binary language of moisture vaporators and astromech droids and the other was speaking the normal language of actual human beings.

I don’t have to finish the story. The point’s been made. And the ending really doesn’t flatter me. Suffice to say, I was no longer welcome at that particular game store after three of my fellow players had to drag off the barely conscious GM’s body and pull me outside while I just kept screaming “HE’S ON FIRE! JUST SAY IT! SAY ‘HE’S ON FIRE!’ SAY IT!”

Now, lots of you 5E apologists are going to point out that that 4E instilled that way of thinking. The problem was both endemic to and unique to 4E. And you’re just f$&%ing wrong. Exhibit one is all the bulls$&% surrounding unarmed weapon attacks. Exhibit two is every question anyone ever asked Crawford on Twitter. Exhibit three is hit dice.

Noodle that one.

Point is GMs tend to see the game’s mechanics as the game’s reality. All the description and narration and flavor text? That’s just fluffy overlay. It’s decoration. The mechanics — the rules and systems — are how the game works. The narrative just makes it look good.

Some of you might even be posting comments right now like this:

You know, Angry, ongoing fire damage doesn’t have to mean someone’s actually on fire. After a serious burn, the skin damage continues for some time even after contact with the flames. Or the hot object. Maybe the ongoing damage just reflected that. Or maybe it came from him being scalded by his armor. Metal takes a long time to dissipate heat after all. Did you ever think of that Mr. Sexy Gaming Genius? And when will you learn how to swear properly?

While that’s all possible, it doesn’t address the real issue. The issue of putting the game’s mechanics first. “The rules say he’s taking fire damage and there’s no way to extinguish it,” you think, “so, therefore, that must represent something other than being on fire.” You’re treating the rules as sacred and any mismatch between the rules and the game world’s narrative, descriptive reality can be resolved by changing the description.

Thing is, that solution’s still got problems. If it’s ongoing skin damage or cooking in armor, the character can immerse himself in a convenient pool of water to mitigate the problem. Which the game’s mechanics also don’t allow.

Moreover, the GM actually could have resolved the problem just by describing the situation in narrative terms instead of game terms. Or both. He didn’t. If he’d said, “your armor is heated to scalding and you’re roasting inside of it. You’re taking Ongoing 5 Fire Damage,” he wouldn’t have ended up in the hospital and I wouldn’t have ended up having to drive 75 minutes out of my way to buy gaming stuff thereafter.

But that’s still not the point. The point is treating the mechanics and the descriptive, narrative stuff as two different things. Because, in reality, the descriptive s$&% is part of the game’s mechanics. In fact, the descriptive s$&%’s the bigger part of the game’s mechanics.

Let’s continue the computer metaphor a bit. Say you’re programming a video game. You’ve got to write a bunch of code to tell the computer how to interpret the players’ controller inputs, right? Except you probably don’t. Because someone’s already written that code. All you have to do is import that code into your own game’s program. Which is why at the start of a computer program, you see a bunch of things like:

#include ControllerHandler

When you’re running an RPG — which, by the way, means that you’re running a simulation of a fantastical game world in your head — the game’s rules are a very small part of the program that maintains the fictional universe. The much bigger part is everything you know about how universes work. About how the world works. Which is precisely why GMs exist. You couldn’t actually write a ruleset for an artificial reality; a hypothetical game world that can respond to any player input and behaves the way people would expect any world to behave.

Your intuitive grasp of how s$&% like universes and fire work is part of the game’s code.

#include Reality

And that grasp of how a world should behave? That must supersede the rules in the book. Because the rules in the book are just chunks of code. They’re not how people — players — see the world.

A code-first or code-only GM can’t deal with players who want to end Ongoing 5 Fire Damage in a way that’s not described in the rulebook. A reality-first GM understands that the character’s on fire and knows how being on fire works. He only uses the game’s mechanics to figure out how his understanding of the world interacts with the gamey bits. To translate the fact that fire causes harm into a numerical measure of closeness to being dead.

Literally every rule in every RPG ever has in front of it the unstated caveat “unless the reality of the game’s world suggests otherwise…” As in, “unless the reality of the game’s world suggests otherwise, a creature suffering ongoing damage can only end such a condition with a successful saving throw made at the end of their turn.”

Lots of GMs dismiss the narrative crap. Lots of other GMs don’t dismiss it, but they still see it as separate. In the worst case, that makes it hard for them to respond to the players’ cunning plans and crazy capers. But, even in the best case, that s$&% leads GMs to codify a lot of s$&% they don’t have to. And it keeps them from trusting their own judgment.

For instance, if I describe a treasure as the bust of an ancient Zethinian general, that’s not just so I can tell the players what the treasure looks like. It’s also because, in my world, Zethinian means something. So, if there’s a collector of Zethinian anquities in town, I know he’ll buy that bust. Probably for a good price. And I know he can probably identify the general and share his exploits. Hell, I know anyone with proficiency in History has a chance to identify the general depicted and recall his exploits, right?

I don’t need to write this s$&% down. I know the rules for setting DCs. I know the rules for rolling Intelligence (History) checks. I know the values of different treasures based on their kind and rarity. And I know how much any arbitrary leverage adjusts the sale price. It’s a waste of my time to write down “if the party has any Zethinian artifacts, the dude will pay 50% over their standard value” or “a character can make an Intelligence (History) check (DC 15) to identify the bust as that of a Zethinian general.”

Writing the word “Zethinian” encompassed all those mechanics.

Same with fire. I know how smoke and fire work. I know how saving throws work. I know how much damage, on average, a hazard deals. I know how concealment works. This s$&%’s all in the rule books. If the players are fighting in a burning building, I don’t need to write any special rules for the situation. I don’t need to specifically note that if the characters wrap wet cloths over their faces, they get advantage on the periodic Constitution saving throws to avoid smoke inhalation.

That’s why I call this s$&% Double Secret Game Mechanics. To remind myself — and all of you — that all those little words and descriptors and details and s$&%? They’re part of the game’s mechanics. They encompass all sorts of rules that couldn’t possibly be written down or explained or even fully comprehended. They’re part of the imported game engine which underlies the world simulation I’m running in my head. And they’re the more important part. Because they’re the mechanics the players will consider first.

At least as long as the game’s overly complex and abstract rules and constraints don’t get in their f$&%ing ways.

Proselus asks…

I’m cheating here. Technically, Proselus didn’t ask me anything. The Angry Discord’s resident conspiracy theorist metroid — as opposed to a Metroid conspiracy theorist — posed a general question in that said Discord server. A really good question. And Proselus is awesome. I say that without any snark or sarcasm. So, I asked him if I could answer in the form of an Ask Angry column. He said I could. And here we are.

In his question, Proselus referenced the recent bulls$&% follow-up to my Let’s Start a Campaign feature. Remember that piece of crap? The one wherein I spewed forth 5,000 words about campaign structure that were almost entirely useless save for one short, coherent point at the very end about how a campaign was any game that continued for more than three sessions?

Proselus took that at face value. And he also recognized it as the most revelatory and most game-changing point in that whole pile of bulls$&%. Everyone else got really distracted by the idea that games needed downtime. Not Proselus. He saw the most important bit. And then he questioned it…

I run an online game. My group moves very slowly. We only get through a couple of encounters each session. Should the ‘three-session rule’ apply to my game? Does it apply to every table and every group regardless of their venue or media? Or should it be adjusted for different game setups?

Let me skip to the end, then backfill.

The answer’s yes. Or no. Yes and no. Yes, the three-session rule works for every table and group and venue and setup. No, you should not adjust it based on your specific situation.

However, there’s a but. I’ll get to that at the end.

Understand this: the three-session rule was literally a surprise, lightning flash of insight. It caught me totally by surprise. And that, by the way, is the reason I do the bulls$&% articles. They give me a chance to think out loud. As Jordan Peterson’s observed numerous times — he’s not unique or alone in the observation, he’s just vocal about it — as JP’s observed, people talk to think. To sort out their thoughts. When you push ideas out of your mouth — or onto the screen in my case — it changes the way you think about them. And it opens them to feedback.

Despite it being a flash insight, don’t dismiss the three-session rule as Angry just grabbing the latest big thought to cross his brainspace and then mistaking it for the most important thing ever. Yeah. That happens. But this ain’t that happening.

The three-session rule actually resolved everything that led me to write that bulls$&% in the first place. And also resolved the months of conversations I’d had about campaign structure before writing it. I wish I’d figured it out before I started the article. I’d love to go back and explain more about it. But, again, I just don’t think it’s worth an entire article.

But it’s worth half an Ask Angry. So, here we are.

Let me walk you through this s$&%.

It’s all about structure, right? Well, it’s actually all about running a memorable, satisfying, engaging gameplay experience. Which is more than just running a fun, weekly game, right? You all get that. I hope. It’s why I tell you not to pick what s$&% to put in your game based on what your players think is fun. Why it’s okay to force them to deal with un-fun stuff. Necessary even. Because un-fun things often serve useful purposes. Medicine ain’t fun. Hygiene and exercise ain’t fun. But they make you healthier — and happier — in the long run.

So: satisfying, memorable, engaging gameplay experience, right?

Well, what we remember about the gameplay experience, that’s the story we tell about the game, right? I’ve covered that too. You don’t play a story. You remember a story about a game you played. Important distinction.

The most memorable — and most engaging and most satisfying — stories are the ones that fit our brains’ pre-wired expectations about what stories are. Your brain expects stories to be shaped a certain way. And it tries to fit your experiences — the real ones and the pretend elf ones — into that mold. If it can, you have a memory. A story you remember. If it can’t, the memory — the story — fades.

This is all to do again with psychiatry and neuroscience and memory formation and why humans have been telling stories since language was invented and so on.

As a GM, you can only control the gameplay. That’s the only tool you’ve got. I mean, sure, you can introduce plot elements and characters and setting details and s$&%. But remember that all that s$%&’s less important to a story than the story’s structure. Than its shape. Take my games. I run fairly normal, boring fantasy fare. No Cthulhu beasts. No time travel. No social-political propaganda crap. No spellpunk garbage. It’s the sort of s$&% Tolkien would have written if he was just trying to make a quick buck selling short stories to Bland Fantasy Quarterly.

Nonetheless, my players retain that s%$&. It stays with them. I know. We’re always reminiscing about the stuff that happened. The big character moments, the fun little twists and surprises, and the goofy distractions. Hell, my players can actually remember that they found the solution to a current puzzle in a session I ran seven months before. I s$&% you not. They’re great players. Don’t get me wrong. But a lot of it’s down to how I put my game together.

Point is the single most impactful thing you can do to run the best possible game is to structure your gameplay so the story the players remember about your game is a good story. How you put your game together will determine whether you end up with an engaging, memorable, satisfying, long-term campaign.

I’m not saying the ideas — the plots and characters and details — don’t have an impact. They do. Really bad details can ruin a well-structured game. Really good details can elevate — temporarily, at least — a poorly-structured game. But they can’t save it forever. I’m just saying that a good structure makes a good game, even if the game’s details are a little bland and samey.

Let’s say you accept all that. How does any of that s$&% lead to this three-session rule? Sessions are just arbitrary breaks, aren’t they? At the end of a session, the game basically goes on pause. It unpauses at the start of the next session. Session breaks don’t interrupt the gameplay or the narrative. They just put the game into suspended animation. Right? You should be able to impose a good structure on a game without any regard for the breaks between sessions. Right?

Right?

As you read that, your brain was probably already narrowing its eyes. There’s something wrong with that conclusion. You might not know what. But you don’t quite buy it.

Thing is, you can’t ignore the session breaks. Your game’s broken into sessions. It’s unavoidable. And your players can’t binge your campaign like a Netflix series. They can’t consider it as a whole once the season’s done. Or the arc. Or the series. It’s broken into chunks.

Your brain’s always trying to turn experiences into narratives. And so, it’s looking for the things it needs to weave a narrative. Especially things like beginnings and endings and high points. Anything that looks like a beginning, an ending, or a high point will be treated like one. The starts and ends of sessions? Those sure as hell look like beginnings and endings. Your brain’s going to try to cut the narratives there. Like it or not. When a session’s done, it’s going to consider the session as a narrative. To try to, anyway.

When it comes to a long-term game, your brain’s also trying to stitch the chunks together into a bigger narrative. Stories within stories. If it can’t figure out how to join up the stuff, it’ll just start dumping whatever doesn’t fit. Memories fade over time. The ones that don’t — the stories and experiences you remember — are the ones you share. Or review. Or revisit. Or reflect on.

When s$&% in one narrative joins up with s$&% in another, older, remembered narrative, your brain revisits that old story. That strengthens the old story and shores up the new story as well. That’s how your brain builds up ongoing stories. But if the older stories have already faded, the new stories don’t have anything to connect to.

That’s the essence of the three-session rule. You have three sessions to make s$&% look like a proper narrative before your players’ brains — and probably yours — just start jettisoning s$&%. Dumping details and sessions and stories down the memory hole as isolated, one-off, unimportant, unreinforced garbage.

Your brain’s going to treat every session as a separate narrative because it’s got a beginning and it’s got an ending. And your brain will even assign a climax to every session. A high point. And then, it’ll hold on to that story for a while. To see if it’s important. If things relate back to it, it’s important. It stays. Otherwise, it goes. What makes it important? What relates back to it? Well, the biggest, most powerful thing that relates stories is structuring them as parts of a bigger story.

So, however you structure your game, you’d better work with the fact that your game’s broken into chunks. Into sessions. And that a brain won’t hold on to a session-story forever waiting to see if it’s part of anything bigger.

And that’s why it doesn’t matter how long you go between sessions — within reason — or how much happens in each session — within reason — or how long your sessions are or anything else. A session’s a session to a brain looking to string stories together. And it won’t hold those sessions forever waiting for a narrative to emerge.

I did say there was but… to this whole thing. And here it is…

I know full well there’s exceptions to this s$&%. There’s always exceptions. I know, for example, I’m one of them. I don’t follow the three-session rule very well at all. But I still end up with memorable and satisfying games. That said, I know the three-session rule is hurting my game. Whenever I see feedback, one thing my players often mention is how they wish the game would move a little faster. It drags. We don’t get through much in a session of play. I’ve even lost players over that issue over the years.

Nonetheless, despite complaints about my game’s slow dragginess, my players still like my games. A lot. They tell me so. And I seek feedback a lot. I also know they remember details about the game. Often over long stretches. And they engage with the world. They care about it. So, I’m doing something to mitigate the three-session problem. Not consciously necessarily. Because, again, the three-session problem was a flash insight. A moment where all the different little details fell into place. But I’m pretty sure I can list two or three things that I do at my table that stall out the three-session clock. Mostly to do with how I structure individual sessions and how I interconnect the details of my world so my players are constantly revisiting events from prior sessions in their heads. That’s a whole other story.

Point is, I’m the exception that proves the rule. Which is a phrase no one uses correctly. No one but me anyway. It’s based on an alternative definition of prove. Prove meaning to test. Like a proving ground is a testing ground. The exception that proves the rule is something that apparently contradicts the rule, but on analysis, it turns out the rule’s fine and there’s something funky going on with the exception. In my case, player feedback tells me the three-session rule is a thing. I’m just succeeding despite it. And the specific things I do at my table actually spackle over the three-session rule which proves there’s a hole to spackle over in the first place.

Don’t worry if you don’t follow that crap.

Just understand there’s a but… following this answer. Part of that’s the fact that some folks and some games manage to do all the right things well-enough that breaking the three-session rule doesn’t break the game.

The rest of the but… is but you maybe don’t have to care about any of this s$&%. What I’m talking about right now is how to run the theoretical bestest, most memorable, most engaging, most satisfying game you possibly can. If you and your buddies are happy getting together week after week and chipping away at a massive dungeon like it’s Soulsborne boss’ butt — if grand epics you’ll remember forever aren’t why you sit down at the game table — well, f$&% the three-session rule. D&D’s perfectly fine if it’s just about spending a few hours a week killing and looting monsters and nothing else.

And frankly, you should remember that whenever you read anything I write ever. What I say is true, but it’s never absolute. And just because it’s true, that doesn’t mean you have to accept it.

You don’t need to run the best game. You just need to run a good-enough game. And only you know what that even means.